Before you can begin to put together a marketing plan, you need to do some basic market research. This is where you find out as much as possible about your target market, information which will help you devise a sales strategy, advertising campaign and overall plan to achieve future business growth. Market research can be conducted in a number of ways and here we lay out a few common practices to help you gather information about your potential consumers.
- Primary Research – This should be done as early as possible and can include interviews, surveys, questionnaires and even holding focus groups. You need to establish what is being considered by potential consumers when they come across your products/services, what they like and dislike about the products/services, how they think you can improve the products/services and how much they would pay for the products/services. This information will help shape the overall marketing plan as well as your sales strategy. Every time you experience significant business growth and/or expand your product line/services, more primary research should be conducted.
- Secondary research – You don’t have to do all the leg-work. There is already a considerable bank of market data available to you which can be analysed by your company to improve your overall marketing plan. This data can help you to identify your target consumers as well as competitors and will also enable you to set goals. Having clear aims and direction will help you steer steadily towards sustainable, achievable business growth. Contact your trade association for access to their secondary research. You can also use books, existing company records, public surveys and research studies.
- Regular data collection – once you have written your marketing plan and put your sales strategy into practice, it becomes a living, breathing beast. You need to keep it up to date and relevant to your audience and the best way to do this is to continue collecting data. Both quantitative and qualitative data sets are useful. Quantitative (mathematical) data can be collected from website analytics as well as social media platform analytics. Qualitative data is more responsive to the opinions and experiences of consumers, collecting their answers in the form of short surveys and questionnaires before, during and after the purchasing process.
Whether you use face-to-face interviews, telephone calls, email or pop-up widgets to gather your market research, it’s crucial to your future sales strategy to not only launch your business based on extensive, comprehensive marketing research but also continually update this information. This may require some financial investment but it will save you money in the long run because it will minimise future mistakes when it comes to advertising your products/services in the best places as well as developing a comprehensive plan to target your consumers cost-effectively. It can be hard to engage consumers to give feedback and you yourself will probably have avoided doing exactly this in the past. But the challenges facing market research should not deter you from this vital process when it comes to developing your marketing plan. A well researched and diligently followed plan will lead to business growth and take your business to new heights.